How Many Chickens?

Even the president's most ardent supporters were surprised when they heard that Mr. Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. His biggest opponents claim to be embarrassed and outraged by it, and cite it as another example of his celebrity being far bigger than his accomplishments. Troll the internet for five minutes, and you can find a thousand explanations for why Obama should not have won, and there is a strong case to be made for that: The Iraq war is still going. The Afghanistan war is growing. The threat of a nuclear Iran is expanding. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues. Guantanamo remains open. In Obama's time on the national and world stage, we've heard peaceful rhetoric, but where are the results?

In a great piece in Foreign Policy, Ronald Krebs summarizes (without necessarily supporting) the justification for this prize:

The Nobel Peace Prize's aims are expressly political. The Nobel committee seeks to change the world through the prize's very conferral, and, unlike its fellow prizes, the peace prize goes well beyond recognizing past accomplishments. As Francis Sejersted, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee in the 1990s, once proudly admitted, "The prize ... is not only for past achievement. ... The committee also takes the possible positive effects of its choices into account [because] ... Nobel wanted the prize to have political effects. Awarding a peace prize is, to put it bluntly, a political act."

If the goal is to raise awareness about an issue - which Krebs refers to as "aspirational prizes" - often little is accomplished, and at times the prize-winner's cause is actually negatively impacted. Yet these types of prizes are becoming all-too common - awarding the promotion of peace rather than the accomplishment of peace.
In many cases, "the Nobel committee's noble intentions have set off a tragic chain of events."

For Obama, it is a stretch to believe that the world will suddenly pay more attention to his policies or approaches, though I also doubt it will negatively impact anything he's doing; he's already the biggest political celebrity on the planet. Above all else, this does seem to be a direct affirmation of his style. The Nobel committee is in effect saying that in speaking of peace on the international stage in the way Obama does - in Cairo, at the UN, in Germany - he is doing the right things to actually accomplish it. It's saying that Obama is not simply style over substance, but rather that his style is substantive (as well as a substantive change from his predecessor).

That said, the Nobel committee has a basketful of eggs, and is already counting the chickens. I think it's fair to criticize the committee for their choice, but let's not turn this into an attack on the man himself. Republicans and Democrats alike should take this as an opportunity to demand that he live up to his celebrity, but not to pull him down from it. We should expect American presidents to be international celebrities. We should expect them to be the world's biggest defenders of peace. We Americans love to see the mighty fall, but little is accomplished by pulling Mr. Obama off his pedestal.

So let's think of it this way: Americans have higher standards than the Nobel committee, and while we're glad that the world thinks so highly of him (or at least we should be glad), we haven't seen enough. So, Mr. President, you've won your award - now please go out and earn it.